Brian James McNamara
Analyst · UBS
Thanks, Guillaume. Appreciate the questions. Let me take the first one on North America, and I'll pass it to Dawn for the second question. And maybe just as I get into North America, we do feel good about EMEA, LatAm and APAC and also feel good about the back half in both those areas. Also feel great about the organic profit growth driven by the gross margin, 160 basis points, and the strong cash flow. But there's no doubt that North America has been a challenge. And maybe if you step back, I think there's two market dynamics and then let me touch on our own performance. I mean, first, there's no doubt that there's a challenging consumer environment, and consumer confidence is at a low, and I think our categories are more resilient than most in that context. But we are impacted in certain categories and smoking cessation is definitely one of them. I talked about it in the past. This is $30 to $40 price point range. So we are seeing trade down in that category. Outside of that, we're not seeing a trade down overall in the business. And that has been a drag on growth. I think the second thing is we continue to see the shift to Dollar and Club, which are more value channels, which is what we're seeing in this consumer environment, and e-comm. Now I'd say in all cases, we have strong presence in those channels. And I've talked about e-comm, where 16 of our top 18 brands they actually have better shares online than offline. So that's very manageable. But we are continuing to see these inventory pressures, drug retailers, but I think everybody, all retailers in the U.S. are dealing with that kind of environment. Now as far as our performance. Our consumption is growing ahead of the market. Now to be clear, the market is slightly down, about 0.5%, and our consumption is slightly up, about 0.5%. So we're growing ahead of the market, but not significantly to be clear. Now we're seeing strong growth and market share gains in Oral Health and market share gains across Digestive Health, brands like Tums and Benefiber are doing extremely well. But overall, we're not satisfied with the performance. And we have a bit mixed performance in Pain Relief and VMS. So let me unpick that a bit. So in pain, in the first half, we have slightly lost share on Advil. Now we've taken action, we have new plans in place. We have a new media campaign that's on air live now, and we see early signs. I mean in the back half of Q2, we were getting -- we were back to share growth on Advil. Now on VMS, we have two brands, Emergen-C and Centrum. On Emergen-C, we continue to see really strong consumption and share gains. Now sales were up low single digits. Emergen-C was one of the brands that at the end of last year when we saw that very low cold and flu incidences in December, we started the year with a bit of higher inventories. But overall, the brand is very healthy. Centrum has been a challenge. Now overall on Centrum, really good growth, mid-single-digit growth outside the U.S., high single-digit growth in Q2 outside the U.S., but we saw declines in the U.S. Now a year ago is when we first activated our cognitive claims on Centrum Silver, and we grew high teens consumption, about 4x the market. So we're indexing across a high base. But listen, that said, even with a high base, our expectation is we continue to grow share. So we firmed up our plans. We have -- we are -- reactivating the Centrum Silver with a new claim, slows cognitive aging by 60% with some innovations in the U.S. on Centrum in the back half, and we have a new partnership with U.S. women's soccer that we're beginning to activate that we're optimistic about. So in the back half, I definitely expect to see improved share positions on Centrum and Advil, but we do believe the inventory reduction will continue to happen. As we look at inventories across retailers, I think they've been much more proactively managing their inventory levels as they're seeing issues with them delivering on their numbers in the whole environment. We want to more proactively manage that with them going forward. Really, really important that we do what we need to this year to make sure that we're at the right levels as we exit the year into next year. So in our around 3.5% guidance, we are not looking for a significant improvement in the U.S. environment at all, and we're expecting to continue to see inventory pressure. I will say though, looking forward to the medium term, we have a fantastic business in the U.S. Really, really pleased with Oral Health in the U.S. where we gained 0.5 share point in the first half and continue to go from strength to strength and we're confident in 2025, 2026 and beyond as we strengthen the business in the back half. Why don't I pass it to Dawn to talk about A&P?